CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Would you look at that?”
Andie laughed—actually laughed out loud in delight—when Will’s hippotherapy mount ambled into the yard, led by the older man she’d met on her first visit to Saddle Tree Farm.
The creature, a stocky Haflinger horse short enough to comfortably nestle its head in her armpit if it so desired, still wore its shaggy winter coat—which was fair enough, given that icicles were still hanging from the eaves of the barn. Chestnut hair stuck out in tufts and whorls all over the animal’s solid body, fading to a contrasting cream under its belly, where the girth of a therapy saddle disappeared into a nest of shaggy fuzz. A notably pretty face—with a fine, tapered muzzle—poked out from beneath a voluminous flaxen forelock, through which Andie was able to make out the friendly gleam of one steady brown eye.
Will, almost falling out of Rhys’s arms in his eagerness to get to the horse, squealed and flapped his hands in its face. The horse, standing squarely on its four sturdy legs, didn’t even blink.
“I’m starting to feel better about this,” Rhys said. He turned to Andie and added in a stage whisper, “Do you think we could smuggle her into the back of the car and take her home?”
“Um, ‘she’ is actually a he,” corrected the woman standing on Andie’s other side. She was an attractive woman in her midfifties with a distinctive snowy-white bob that cast a flattering light on her neat features. “Not that you can tell under all that fluff. This is Ace. He’s our favorite hippotherapy horse for the under-fives.”
“I can see why,” Andie said. “Ace is adorable. It was so kind of you to fit us in at short notice, Mrs. Mulcahy.”
“Please, call me Maisie.”
Maisie and her husband, Ed, were the owners of the farm, Andie had discovered in her calls leading up to the visit. Maisie, a speech therapist by training, had been hospitalized the previous week, when Andie had first shown up at the farm.
Andie smiled. “I hope your leg is feeling better.” She gestured to the forearm crutch the woman was using to support her weight.
“If only it were just the leg,” Maisie sighed. “But we don’t need to talk about that. Tell me about your little boy here.”
“Rhys’s little boy,” Andie corrected.
“Of course. You said on the phone that you’re his OT, right?” Maisie stopped to steady herself, leaning more heavily on the crutch. Andie noticed Ed’s eyes narrow in concern.
“I’m fine, Ed,” Maisie assured him. “But would you call Carol and Emily over here? We’re almost ready for their help.”
Andie offered to take Ace’s reins, and they walked slowly toward the indoor arena while Ed headed in the direction of the main barn. Andie and Rhys took turns filling Maisie in on Will’s history and development, describing the therapies he was already receiving.
“If he takes to this, you’ll want to be in touch with his regular speech therapist,” Andie pointed out. “But I should be part of the conversation, too.”
“Andie is coordinating all of Will’s care,” Rhys said, and his glance felt like a caress, his implicit trust like a hand at her back.
Every time she looked at him, her mind swam with a dizzying mix of fear and elation. She’d tried to come clean with him about her concerns on the way back from the playground the day before, but there was no way she could fully explain the alarm she felt over her attachment to him and Will, or the dangers of the emotional and ethical minefield she found herself traversing. She’d planned to retreat to her room last night to buy herself some space. They’d given Will his bath before Rhys took him to the library to meet with Karina, so technically her evening should have been her own. But Rhys sought her out on some pretext or other, and, sure enough, she’d wound up in his arms and in his bed. Whenever she got within a twenty-foot radius of him, her traitorous body seemed determined to throw itself up against his, like a bobby pin stuck to an MRI scanner.
She could live with the straightforward honesty of their physical attraction. Surely it would ultimately burn out, and they would be free once more. It was the rest that she fretted about. The way he watched her with that uniquely Rhys-like mixture of wonder and hope, completely unaware of how unworthy she was of the honor.
“Ah, here are Carol and Emily.” Maisie’s voice broke into Andie’s thoughts.
She introduced a tall woman in her late forties as Carol, one of the farm’s volunteer side walkers. Carol’s daughter, Emily, in her early twenties and the spitting image of her mother, was one of Saddle Tree’s part-time riding instructors, who also helped out with the hippotherapy program.
Maisie began explaining the basics of the first session and ran through the standard safety rules while Rhys held Will, who was resting one outstretched hand on Ace’s shaggy neck. Andie couldn’t help but notice that Will wasn’t fretting and fussing the way he often did when the adults around him were occupied in conversation. He kept his gaze fixed on the placid horse, tentatively rubbing his fingers through his thick coat.
When the time came to get Will up on Ace, Rhys was the one who deposited him in the saddle. Will clutched at his father’s arm, his vestibular sense triggered as he was lifted through the air. Once on board, he leaned forward in the deep, padded seat, and Emily guided his hands firmly around the sturdy handlebar. His eyes were wide as Carol and Emily took up their positions on either side of him, fitting his feet into the stirrups and holding his legs steady with a gentle, even pressure as Maisie gave the order to walk. He continued to crouch forward with a mystified, blissed-out look on his face, as he felt the unfamiliar rhythmic motion of Ace’s gait.
Andie was so overcome with emotion as she watched that she barely noticed Rhys slipping his hand into hers. She had to incline her head away for a moment to contain her tears, focusing on Will and Ace’s methodical progress down the length of the arena. Maisie stood in the center, resting her weight on her crutch as she assessed Will’s response. There was something therapeutic about just watching the horse’s repetitive motion, the pattern of his steps, the predictable bobbing of his serene blond head. By the time they’d done two circuits of the arena, Will’s posture had loosened and straightened a little, and he gave an excited half squeal, half laugh as he passed by.
Maisie directed Carol and Emily to bring Ace closer to the center in ever-decreasing circles, and she started to walk slowly alongside, talking to Will in a soothing, singsong voice and introducing some simple games to focus his attention. Andie felt a shiver of concern as she watched the older woman’s progress—the stiffness in her gait and the way she favored her left side. She’s in pain.
Maisie persevered with the therapy session nonetheless, focusing on Will’s receptive language, engaging him in reciprocal activities so she could gauge his level of functioning. By the end of the session, only one of his hands gripped the saddle’s handle. He’d woven the other into the pale strands of Ace’s mane. He squawked when he was lifted down from Ace’s back but was pacified when Maisie asked Carol to help him brush the horse.
“I have to make a couple of calls while they finish up,” Maisie said, “but would you like to join me in the house for a cup of coffee afterward?”
Andie agreed enthusiastically and offered to carry Ace’s saddle back to the tack room while Rhys stayed to watch Will. She inhaled the smell of clean leather and horse as she slid the saddle back onto its rack, hung up the girth, and then wandered back out into the yard. It was a gorgeous day, bright and blazing, and the red barn stood out against the backdrop of snow-covered paddocks and dark evergreens. The icicles had started to thaw and drip, and Andie leaned against a post-and-rail fence, closing her eyes and basking for a moment in the resplendent light.
She yelped when a blast of warm, moist air and the brush of bristles against the back of her neck announced the arrival of the black mare she’d noticed on her first visit to Saddle Tree Farm.
“Hello there!” Andie laughed, turning to marvel at the large beast. A child’s shriek echoed across the yard, and both Andie and the mare turned to watch a preschool-age boy dart across the half-frozen ground, chasing after the barn cat. A girl of about ten or eleven followed, her ponytail bouncing as she giggled and skipped, swinging her riding helmet from one hand.
“Jake, Becca, get in the car!” A woman’s harried voice trailed after them. “Jake, you have soccer in fifteen minutes, and you have to change on the way, remember?”
Andie flung a sympathetic smile at the woman who emerged from the barn’s center aisle, laden with coats, backpacks, and snack bags. Jake’s and Becca’s hearing had apparently been compromised by the overpowering cuteness of the ginger cat, who found a dry patch of ground and started writhing exuberantly.
“Kids! We’re going to be late!” The mom’s increasingly strident tone fell on deaf ears as brother and sister laughed and exclaimed, both bent low over the cat’s fluffy belly.
A long time ago, Andie had been the same way with Gus, she remembered with a wistful smile. They’d always found it so easy to get on each other’s wavelength, aware of their mother’s stress only in that distant, myopic way of children. They’d been that way on Gus’s very last day.
The disastrous chain of events had started with the abandoned piano lesson, Andie remembered, a sick feeling churning in the pit of her stomach. It had been raining—actually, sleeting—and she’d plopped down next to Gus on the couch after school to watch one of his favorite cartoons, succumbing to the guilty lassitude that makes cabin fever its own kind of pleasure. Too much TV. Too much of the same four walls.
She was supposed to go to her lesson, but lethargy had taken over, and she hadn’t practiced enough that week. Like Jake and Becca in the farmyard, she didn’t want to switch gears and follow the schedule. She didn’t want to spend an hour seated on the wooden bench at Mrs. Murphy’s, her back ramrod straight as she tried to wing it, hoping the teacher wouldn’t chafe at her slow progress.
So she’d complained of a stomachache and begged her mother to let her stay home. Whined, actually, with a relentlessness guaranteed to wear Susan down. Susan usually brought Gus along to piano and had him play in the waiting room while Andie did her lesson, and there was no chance of her being able to wrangle two recalcitrant kids into the car. So Andie had won. If only she’d known what a Pyrrhic victory it was.
Soon the relative quiet of the house was shattered by the shouts and giggles of the two youngest Tilly siblings. Gus was in a rambunctious mood, throwing himself on Andie’s supposedly ailing stomach and causing her to dissolve into laughter and squeals as she tried to defend herself. Susan’s face was sharp with irritation, her warnings increasingly strident, but Andie and Gus were unable to contain their high spirits, innocent hilarity tightening its grip the more they tried to suppress it. Adult displeasure had no power to penetrate their childish communion. They were giddy and punchy, and the tide of their raucous play would not ebb. Finally, Susan, stiff with tension, had ordered them to get their jackets and rain boots on and ushered them outside, headed for tragedy.
“I see you’ve met Shanti.” Maisie’s voice startled Andie back to the present, and she turned to watch Jake and Becca’s mom ease her car into the snow-lined road, the children safely buckled inside. Andie’s left hand was clenched in the mare’s thick mane, but even the coarseness of the strands against her fingers seemed less real to her than the sleet and fog of that distant evening.
She forced herself to attend to Maisie. “Yes, she’s incredible.”
“She’s my baby,” Maisie said fondly. “She’s been with me for almost twenty years. Since before I got sick.”
“Sick?” Andie echoed, the fog in her mind receding as she focused on the woman in front of her. “Do you mind my asking . . .”
“It’s MS,” Maisie said. “You should know, because my health could interfere with the continuity of Will’s treatment if you decide to pursue therapy here.”
She gestured to her cane and the stiffness of her right leg as they walked back to the stable. “Much of the time I do okay, but when I have a bad spell, I can’t get around like I used to. Hippotherapy can be rather physical work if you do it properly. Our side walkers are wonderful, but I’m the only accredited therapist we have.”
“I’m sorry.” Andie wasn’t quite sure what else to say. “Are you sure—”
“I’m not throwing in the towel just yet,” Maisie said with a shaky smile. “If you’ll bear with me, I’d love to work with Will.”
“I think Rhys would agree that we’d jump at the chance to work with you whenever you can do it. And of course we’re happy to be flexible.”
“Then we’ll make it happen.” Maisie’s smile broadened. “I’ll look at the schedule. A lot of the timing depends on when our side walkers are available. I have to rely on volunteers to keep the program going.”
“I might be able to help you there.” Andie explained the undemanding schedule she was lucky enough to have while in Concord, with hours free while Will was at preschool and his other therapies. “I know my way around horses, and I’d love to volunteer.”
“Today’s my lucky day, then.” Maisie’s brown eyes gleamed. “Come in and have a coffee, and I’ll get you scheduled in for a training session before you change your mind.”